“Cathy,” called Archie, jumping out of the front seat. “Emma, Emma!”
The music ceased abruptly and Zsoska came to the door. “Hello, Snapp,” she said coolly.
“Zsoska!” said Archie, not bothering with his Hungarian phrase book. “What’s the damn idea? You can’t just take my daughters off like that.”
“Emoke, my daughter,” said Zsoska. “You sitting table every day. You no telling me, Snapp.”
“Well, we were planning to tell you,” said Archie. “That was the plan.”
“Hi, Dad,” said Cathy, popping out from behind Zsoska.
“Kit-Kat! How could you let this happen?”
“You didn’t tell Zsoska that it was okay? She said you did.”
“Well, I mean,” Archie stumbled, “Of course I’ve wanted us all to get to know each other better… Is Emma all right? That’s the important thing.”
“Emma,” said Cathy, “is in seventh heaven. At least now we know where she gets her musical talent from.”
“Zsoska?” whispered Archie, staring in awe at her striped black and yellow mane and fiery eyes.
“Grandpa!” said Cathy.
A ruby flush of alcohol smoothed out his weather-beaten face and gave him a congenial warmth that I suspected didn’t always survive into the morning. He had Zsoska’s black eyes, hooked nose and high cheekbones, though his mouth sank into a well of toothlessness. Like Zsoska he also had a full, sweeping head of hair, dramatically white. But his imposing head sat on a withered body; one of his legs dangled uselessly.
He was wearing a faded white shirt and an embroidered vest, and in his lap was a beautiful old fiddle. Next to him, clutching her own small violin, was Emma, no longer blank-faced, but smiling, though she was still silent and her eyes gave away nothing.
Grandpa greeted us in Hungarian and offered us a round of ţuicǎ from the bottle next to him on the table. Zsoska produced glasses. Archie took a sip and choked, while Nadia belted hers down. I cautiously touched my lips to the glass and put it down again.
“The old guy was totally excited when he saw us come in with Emma and her violin case,” Cathy told us. “Zsoska talked a bunch to him and he cried and hugged Zsoska and Emma and even me. Then he went into the other room and got out his violin and they’ve been playing ever since. It’s kind of amazing. I mean, I’ve heard Emma play a lot, but just classical stuff, over and over. But this is different. Gramps plays part of a tune and Emma plays it after him. Then he plays the whole thing, Emma plays the whole thing, and then they play it together. I can’t imagine how Emma holds it in her head like that.”
“My father happy,” said Zsoska, trying to pour us more brandy. “Emoke stays here.”
“No!” said Archie. “Well, just a little. You see, Zsoska, I’m afraid that wouldn’t work. I mean, we were just planning to stay here in Arcata a few days, not more than a week. We have to get back to Munich to the children’s mother, to Lynn that is, Cathy’s mother and Emma’s adopted mother. We’re very happy to meet your father, in fact, that was one of the things we’d been hoping to do on this trip, and that was to, you know, make contact with Emma’s family. There are a few questions we have regarding, you know, family background, things like that, but once we get a fuller picture, we don’t really have any reason to trouble you further or take up any more of your time.”
Zsoska said something to her father and he shook his white head. He took up his violin again and began a new tune, a loud and lively csárdás. After a few seconds, Emma picked up her violin and followed him. It was as if she knew the direction the notes were taking without needing to think about it.
“Emma,” cajoled Archie. “Come on, sweetie. Time to go. We’ll say thank you to the nice man with the violin, but it’s time to get back to our hotel for a nap.”
“Emoke staying here, Snapp!” said Zsoska. “My mother coming from work. My mother seeing her.”
“Nadia,” said Archie. “Can’t you help?”
Nadia addressed Zsoska in Romanian, but I knew immediately, when I heard the word “police,” that she was taking the wrong tack. In a few moments the two of them were screaming at each other.
Archie, meanwhile, was inching over to Emma’s side, while Cathy looked on as if she were watching a scene from Dostoyevsky come to life.
“Can’t we compromise?” I finally yelled. The music and the shouting stopped. I continued, “Obviously Zsoska would like her mother to see Emma. What if Emma were to stay here tonight? Would that be so terrible? In the morning, Zsoska can bring her back to the hotel.”
“She won’t bring her back,” said Archie. “You can be sure of that.”
I addressed Zsoska: “You know you can’t keep Emma here. You gave her up and you have no legal claim anymore. If Archie does let Emma stay here tonight, would you bring Emma back to the hotel tomorrow?”
“Yes,” Zsoska said sullenly. “I not lying.”
“But Emma will be scared here with these people, without us,” said Archie. “Lynn would never forgive me if something happened.”
“What can happen, Archie? Have you ever seen Emma so engaged? What could possibly happen?”
“Maybe she won’t want to come back.”
I looked at Emma’s shining dark eyes. They were the equivalent of classical music, wordless and full of feeling.
“Snapp,” said Zsoska. “I need knowing my daughter.”
On the way back to Arcata I sat in the back seat with Cathy, while up in front Archie pulled out his steno pad. I thought he might want to discuss the situation with Zsoska, but he must have judged it safer emotionally to take refuge in journalism.
“I see I’ve interviewed almost everyone except you, Nadia,” he said. “Maybe I could ask you some questions about Romanian history. There are some things I still don’t understand…”
“I tell you,” said Nadia eagerly. “First, here is story: In beginning God give to all countries many things. To Romania he give everything—forest, river, mountains, minerals, good farmland, even oil. Then God say, This country got too much good, I think I give it something bad. So he put Romanian people here. Hah!”
“That’s a hard story to tell about your country,” said Archie, nonplussed. “The Romanian people I’ve met have been absolutely wonderful, absolutely…”
“Hard, yes!” interrupted Nadia. “Romania very hard, very tragic history. First one thing, then another. All problems start with Turkeys, Turkeys come in middle age, many hundred years we under Turkeys.” Nadia made some wave-like movements with the hand not on the wheel. “Up and down, that is us. We revolt, then we are squished—squashed? We are poor, very poor and ignorant. Work in fields, give all to some lord. Lord gives to Turkeys. So. Finally we got some kings. First king from Germany, pretty good. Queen Marie very good, but King Carol very bad, crazy. There are wars. First World War. Second World War. Between wars Iron Guard fascists. After wars, Stalin takeover. What a mess.
“So, we got communists. Gheorghiu-Dej, big Stalinist. Soviets tell us to collectivize farms, make big industry. Then Ceauşescu comes in 1965. First there is some freedoms, but soon bad times. More he get, more he want. Bad to worst. Real craziness starts. Total insanity. No talking to foreigners. No passports. Taxes for not enough children. Women dying abortions. Ceauşescu big man in world politics. He stand up to Soviets, support Czechs in 1968. Americans love him, Nixon visits. Soviets say, Fine, Romania, no more good friends with you! Hah! Ceauşescu says, okay, we do everything ourselves. We pay foreign debt through export, thank you very much. We don’t need food here. We don’t need electricity. We don’t need petrol for cars. We are miracle people, we live on air.”
“I’ve just been talking to Dr. Gabor about the rights of the Hungarian minority,” Archie interrupted. “He says all the Romanians suffered under Ceauşescu, but the Hungarians suffered the most.”
“That man, he got one idea, one idea only,” Nadia said, her voice rising. “And that to make tourists hate Romania. Do we treat him ba
d here in Arcata? No! We Romanians are the ones to suffer. He is king of Arcata, that man.”
Archie continued scribbling. “So you’re not in favor of Hungarian nationalism, Nadia?”
“I am in favor peace and quiet! We have been through plenty. Let’s just shut up now and be friends.”
“Romania has sure been through the wringer, all right,” Archie agreed. “But wouldn’t you say that things are getting better, Nadia? Ceauşescu’s gone, the Soviet Union has disintegrated. You’ve held democratic elections. Maybe not everybody is happy with Ilescu, but he’s not as bad as Ceauşescu. Abortion is legal again. People are free to travel.”
“Yes, yes,” Nadia said, her habitual optimism reasserting itself. “All this is true. We are dreaming of freedom for years and years. Now we have it and we must be grateful. Romania has many problems still, but when things are bad here, I always say to myself, thank you, God, at least we are not Yugoslavia.”
In the back seat I remembered what I had been doing before the commotion with Emma had started.
“So, Cathy,” I asked. “Do you know anything about electricity?”
“Like what?” She was slumped in a corner of the car, worrying her split ends and about two-thirds of the way through The Magic Mountain.
“Well, like, what is it? How does it work?”
“Didn’t you ever take any science classes?”
“Science wasn’t invented when I was growing up. We just had miracles. And anyway, I never went to class. I was a juvenile delinquent.”
“Huh,” she said, clearly not believing me. “So what do you want to know?”
“When we get back to Arcata, I’d like you to come with me.
It was late in the afternoon, and all the patients had left the clinic. A few attendants were mopping the floors, but no one asked us what we were doing down in the corridor that led to the galvanic baths. I didn’t know if they were always so lax, or if they recognized us as peculiar foreigners who wouldn’t understand the regulations anyway.
“So this is the galvanic bath?” Cathy said. “Wow. You know that guy Galvani, the one with the frog legs? It must be named after him.”
“Frog legs?”
“Sure. Back in the eighteenth century. He found out that he could make dead frogs twitch their legs by touching nerve points with metal. It was one of the first electrical experiments. But he got it kind of wrong. He thought the convulsion came from the frog tissue, that there was some electrical life force inside. The electrical charge really came from contact between the two different metals. The guy who came after him, Volta, proved that. Volta figured out that different metals have positive and negative charges, and they produced a current. If he stacked up a bunch of negative and positive metals he could make a battery. Before he did that, Galvani’s nephew used to go around demonstrating this animal electricity on the cut-off heads of cows and sheep. He could make their eyes roll and nostrils twitch. Sometimes he got hold of a corpse and gave it an electric jolt and the arms and legs moved. Mark did some experiments like that once.”
“Not with corpses, I hope.”
“Frog legs,” said Cathy. She looked happier than I’d even seen her. “Just like old Galvani.”
I quieted my squeamish stomach, and pointed out the voltage meter. “As I understand it,” I said, “the meter is set to a very low voltage, and the current runs through these wires into the tubs of water. You get a slight shock, but not much. I tried it, it’s more like a tingling.”
“It must be really low,” Cathy observed, “because if your hair dryer falls in the tub, that’s only 110 volts and that’s enough to do you in. What’s this?” She looked at the meter. “Looks like it doesn’t go up very high. Whatever the voltage is in this place it’s probably transformed down pretty low.”
Cathy went over to the tub contraption, and stuck her finger in the water and then up to her lips. “Distilled, I bet. Okay, you can see here how they’ve worked it out. With all four limbs in the water you’re all set. They’ve got your pathway going in a circuit, I see,” she muttered.
“What do you mean, your pathway?”
“Well, you know when people get electrocuted by a high-voltage wire or by lightning? The current enters at one point, like the head or the hand, and exits through the feet, for instance. It’s more dangerous when the current traverses the heart. So how was Dr. Pustulescu doing it?”
“He put both arms in.”
“That shouldn’t have knocked him off, unless there was a different amount of voltage in each tub. I’m not sure if you could get that to happen through a single source, though.” Cathy went back to the voltage meter and fiddled with it. In a couple of minutes she had the back of it off and was peering inside.
“Is there a way you could increase the voltage?” I asked.
“I think so,” she said. “The electricity is coming from the usual source, you know, through wires, on an alternating current. You wouldn’t be able to increase the voltage past the transformed supply. This isn’t the transformer, only the meter. The transformer’s somewhere else in the building, I guess. If you put in a new transformer or just removed the old one, a lot more voltage would get through. When Mark and I used to make transformers we would put the coils of wire side by side. The more coils, the more voltage you’d get.”
“So there’s something besides this meter, a transformer, that someone could have fiddled with? Where would that be?” Cathy shook her head. “We could go look for it,” she offered. “But even if somebody fooled around with the transformer, they must have fixed it back by now. They would have had to have fixed it back right away if they weren’t going to get caught.”
We both stared thoughtfully at Dr. Pustulescu’s Nightmare Bathing Machine.
“What I don’t get,” said Cathy, “is how you’d make sure that the right person was electrocuted.”
“That,” I said, “continues to be the great problem.”
As we left the basement of the clinic, I noticed Cathy’s shoulders begin to droop again.
“Thanks for the help,” I told her. “You’re way ahead of me on the scientific front. Weren’t all those hours making dead frogs jump worth it?”
Cathy sighed. “My dad says, if I ever want to be a writer like him, I’ll be glad I had an interesting childhood.”
“Do you want to be a writer?”
“I’d rather be a doctor,” she said. “But mostly I just want to be a normal person.” She sighed again. “Did you have an interesting childhood, Cassandra?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “It was crowded and eventful though.”
“My dad says he wants to make up for everything he didn’t have when he was growing up. Is your dad like that?”
“My dad died when I was fourteen.”
“That’s sad,” she said. “I’ve never known anybody who died. Anybody close to me, I mean.”
I looked at her with her adolescent acne, strong nose and floppy hair. My name had once been Cathy too, and before my father’s heart attack I could have said the same.
“Come on,” I said. “I’ll buy you a bottle of orange soda in the lounge. You can tell me the plot of The Magic Mountain. I can’t remember—does anything really happen in that book?”
“Not too much,” she said. “They talk a lot.”
It was porkchops and omelettes again for dinner that night. Eva was missing. Someone said she was supervising Nadia’s brother-in-law while he repaired the Polski Fiat; more likely she was making sure that he didn’t steal any car parts. Everyone else, except for Emma—and Zsoska, who wasn’t working—was there.
While Gladys filled everyone in on her brush with Romanian authority in the morning, I went over to Frau Sophie’s table. “May I join you, Frau Ackermann?”
“Aber ja,” she said heartily, and ordered me a glass of vodka. With a conspiratorial wink she opened up her handbag and brought out a jar of pickled herring. “Bitte,” she said.
“Frau Ackermann,” I said. “Y
ou have been coming to Arcata for ten years, isn’t that right?”
“Yes,” she said. “And I hope to retire here.”
She leaned closer and her reddish face beamed like a geranium over her green dotted dress. “I have a plan. I have been thinking of this many years and next year I will do it. The negotiations are now complete.”
I couldn’t imagine what she was talking about. “Negotiations?”
“With my savings I have bought a house here in Arcata. A villa that I will turn into a small hotel, a Gasthaus. The Germans and Austrians will come back to Arcata if there is good food for them here. I will serve delicious food! Bratwurst and Bürenwurst and true Wienerschnitzel and Schweinbraten, with Knödeln and Kraut. There will be Spätzle, little liver dumplings, and lamb and mutton. We will make our own good rye bread and Kaisersemmel, and dozens of kinds of tortes and strudels. I will have pigs and sheep and a cow especially for cream, and a vegetable garden and an orchard. I will do some of the cooking, and I will hire others to help. Perhaps I will buy other villas. Once again, people will come to Arcata for the good air, the healthy walks and swims, the Ionvital treatments with Dr. Gabor. And for the good Austrian food.”
At that moment the Arcata Spa Hotel version of Wienerschnitzel appeared in front of both of us, its battered coat pale and soggy rather than golden yellow. It lay like a corpse on a funeral pyre of oil-soaked French fries.
“Grauslich,” said Frau Sophie with a shake of her head. “When I open my Gasthaus we will have roasted potatoes, and the Wienerschnitzel will be crisp on the outside, tender on the inside…”
“There was just one thing I wanted to ask you, Frau Ackermann,” I said. “Did you go ahead with your galvanic bath treatment the morning of Dr. Pustulescu’s death?”
“Of course,” she said, through a mouthful of schnitzel. “But my treatment was delayed. They had to find another voltage meter.”
“So you’ve never experienced any problem with the galvanic bath?”
Trouble in Transylvania Page 17